Template talk:TipImported
Version and Rating? What should version exactly be set to? The minimum requirement? Or the latest version this tip was tested? Or maybe a version range? (i.e. 5.7:7.0) Also, most tips seem to work in any version of vim ... So I must wonder how useful this field really is. Rating seems to be a leftover from the old tips database where you could rate scripts, it's not possible to rate scripts right now. Adding some method of rating scripts would be great if this is possible, if it's not then I think the rating field should be removed, there is no way to sort scripts by it and the rating will be outdated. Carpetsmoker 03:16, 13 April 2008 (UTC) ---- I think (though I'm not sure) that the rating field is the rating as it was on vim.org when we imported the tips database. We do have the capability to rate pages in this wiki...I don't remember what skin you can use to do this, but there is one. It shows 5 stars at the bottom of the screen that you can use to rate a tip. I agree that the version field is fairly useless - it gets out of date way too quickly. I'm guessing it is supposed to be the earliest version of Vim that the tip will work in, but I know I don't search the help files for the place every feature I use in a tip got introduced. --Fritzophrenic 05:12, 13 April 2008 (UTC) ---- OMG we're all here - I'll join the party! Back in the days around version 5.7/6.0, there were lots of people with old Vims, and quite a few with the newer versions which had several extensions. Therefore the version field clarified what version the author thought the tip would work on. When the tips were imported from vim.org, some of the people at the time argued that we should keep all the historical info, including keeping tips that are only relevant for old Vims. I wrote some heart-rending opinions that we should recognise our limits and be fairly ruthless about pruning out obsolete stuff. I convinced some people, but not many. However, they have all gone elsewhere for the moment, so we can do what we like! It's painfully obvious to me that getting 1200 tips into a useful condition will never happen unless some old stuff is pruned out. So I would just delete obsolete material. This means there's not really much point in the Version field. However, what if v8.0 comes out in a year? Perhaps having "7.0" in the current tip versions would then be useful. I see the Version field as indicating the oldest Vim supported by the tip. However, it would be a total waste of time to try and figure out whether a particular tip would work in v6.0. Just put "7.0" and move on to something useful. Re the rating: I like Carpetsmoker's radical attitude! If we can't support a rating, why not delete it? However, I think we should keep the rating for another few months. When nearly all tips are cleaned up, I agree that deleting the rating would be good (and it's something that my bot could do without much pain). However, it is sometimes useful when editing a tip to see what rating was given (admittedly, you can use the "imported from" link for that as well). If the rating is low, the tip may not be worth saving. At any rate, I would be more comfortable deleting the rating when we're closer to getting everything cleaned up. The wikia rating system, like Fritzophrenic said, is visible on some skin (I use mono and am glad that I don't see it). It is fully automatic (I think), and I'm pretty sure we'll never have a way of extracting its information into our Rating field. That's another argument in favour of eventually removing the rating. If you visit any tip number after 1504 (say VimTip1505) you will see that new tips do not have the rating. --JohnBeckett 05:50, 13 April 2008 (UTC) ---- It is possible to use ratings, well, sort of, see: User:Carpetsmoker/Rating It's not perfect, for starters using a form would be much better, but this does not seem possible? I also tried the skin with rating, it seems to be a javascript implementation but it didn't work for me (I click and nothing happens?) I didn't really look at it any further because javascript should not be used for this sort of stuff anyway. Another things that might be added to this template is a list requirements (if any). Some tips require certain features to be enabled at compile-time, others require plugins, it would be nice to add this information to the TipImported template. -- User:Carpetsmoker 21:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC) ---- OMG it does work! Congratulations on achieving the impossible, but would you really want this klunky system? For one thing, it can't work with new tips. Also, it's probably not desirable to build in a core component that relies on Bram's web site working with the tip rating forever. And, some users are going to keep hitting the link because they can't see the rating change on the Vim Tips wiki. It would be nice if a user-interaction system were available, but I just don't see it happening on the wikia any time soon. I once wondered whether some sort of script running on another computer could help. For example, Template:Help uses a Python script that I wrote which does some funky translations to generate the correct link to the vimdoc page. A similar kind of script could update a database with tip ratings (and it would be a lot easier for a bot to use that database to update the wiki). I suppose the remote script could even update the wiki? Near the bottom of my to-do list is an item to investigate what Wikia is capable of. I'm not interested in the skins myself, and I'm never going to use something that relies on javascript in my browser. However, MediaWiki does get extended from time to time, and it's probably quite achievable that a widget could be used to update some field in the Vim Tips wiki database, and the tip template could show that field as the rating. Not now, but maybe in the future. --JohnBeckett 02:16, 15 April 2008 (UTC) ----